Enhance your browsing experience with these often-overlooked enhancements to Internet Explorer 8
Some old features return in new form, too, such as toolbar customization, the ability to view pages the way earlier versions of Internet Explorer saw them, and a set of mysterious boxes that have colonized the bottom of the browser window.
These tips will help you take advantage of the new and enhanced features. And if you’re among those who still haven’t upgraded from IE6 or 7, take a peek to see what you’re missing. (See also “Internet Explorer 8 Focuses on Improved Security and Privacy” and “What’s Great About Microsoft Internet Explorer 8?“)
Use Accelerators to Speed up Your Work
Accelerators are add-ons for IE8 that let you quickly do a variety of tasks based on text you select on a Web page: get a stock quote, look up the definition of a word or phrase, map a location, convert currencies, share selected text on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, create a shortened URL, search for a product at an online shopping site and much more.
Select any piece of text on a Web page, and the Accelerator button, shown at right, will pop up; click that button to see the Accelerator menu. (You can also access Accelerators on the right-click contextual menu.)
Some Accelerators show their results in a pop-up window, as shown in the image below, while others appear in a new tab.
IE8 comes with several built-in Accelerators, but third-party developers are already starting to produce a wide range of new ones that you can install yourself. Go to Microsoft’s Accelerator Gallery to see the available options.
Bookmark only the Info You Need with Web Slices
Another add-on that’s new in IE8 is the Web Slice. Web Slices allow you to subscribe to a frequently updated part of a Web page, such as sports scores, headlines or current weather — if the site’s developers have designated that part of the page as a Web Slice. (Most Web sites are not Web Slice-enabled at this time.)
When a page you’re viewing contains a Web Slice, a green icon appears on the toolbar next to the Home icon, as shown to the right. The same icon appears next to the Slice-ready content on a Web page when you mouse over it. Click the icon in either location to see a dialog box asking if you want to add the content to your Favorites bar.
Adding a Web Slice places a button on your Favorites bar that opens a small drop-down box with the updated information from the original page, so you can check the weather, traffic or anything else without interfering with whatever else you’re doing in your browser.
A selection of Web Slices can be found in Microsoft’s Add-On Gallery, but Web Slices are easy to create — watch for the green Web Slice icon to start popping up all over the Web.
Cover Your Tracks with InPrivate Browsing
In addition to the usual cookies and Web history, IE8 saves form data and passwords, search terms in the search box, and URLs in the address bar — all in the name of making things easier for you. But easier for you means easier for everyone else, too — a nosy boss, a prying parent or spouse, or anyone else you might not want to see what you do on the Web.
With InPrivate Browsing, you can browse without leaving a trace. Activate it by selecting InPrivate Browsing from the Safety menu. A new IE8 window will open with a blue InPrivate indicator to the left of the address bar. Nothing you view in that window will be accessible after you close it: no Web history, no saved cookies, no cached Internet files, no saved searches or URLs, no saved form data or passwords — nothing.
Navigate Pages Without a Mouse using Caret Browsing
With IE8’s Caret Browsing feature, you can browse pages, select text and even use Accelerators and other contextual menu functions without removing your fingers from the keyboard. Enable Caret Browsing by pressing F7.
In Caret Browsing, you use the arrow keys to navigate through the page, letter by letter (right and left arrows) or line by line (up and down arrows). To select text, hold down the Shift key while using the arrows.
With text selected, you can use standard keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl+C to copy. Press Shift+F10 or hit the Application key (the little-used key to the right of your space bar with a picture of a menu on it, shown at right) to bring up the right-click context menu. Use the arrow keys to navigate the menu and Enter to make a selection.
If Accelerators aren’t appearing as options in the context menu, you might have a third-party add-on installed that’s interfering. The IE7Pro add-on, for instance, displays a customized context menu that doesn’t include Accelerators. Tweaking the add-on’s preferences settings — or, if all else fails, disabling it — should do the trick.
Protect your Privacy and Even Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering
As you surf the Web, you encounter a fair amount of third-party content (primarily advertising) that doesn’t originate from the sites you’re visiting — and often that content is served up by the same sources over and over. As you encounter such content on site after site, a fairly thorough profile of your browsing habits, interests and even purchases can be assembled by advertisers using cookies to track your behavior.
Ad services such as DoubleClick put a cookie on your PC every time they serve an ad, and each subsequent ad (on the same site or on a new one) checks for that cookie. So if you visit 10 sites that all have ads from a single source, the ad service can tell that you visited those 10 sites, how long you stayed there, which ads you ignored, which ones you clicked and so on.
InPrivate Filtering is a new IE8 feature that selectively blocks content such as ads, statistics apps like Google Analytics, and other (mostly ad-related) content that does not originate from the site you’re visiting. It doesn’t block all such content. Instead, it tracks the sources of third-party content and blocks a source when it crosses a certain threshold (10 viewings by default). The idea is not to block ads, but to block the ability to track individuals across multiple Web sites.
To turn it on, select InPrivate Filtering under the Safety menu. Selecting InPrivate Filtering Settings under the Safety menu shows you how many sites you’ve visited that show content from a particular ad server. Here, you can set the filter’s threshold to anywhere from three to 30 sites, or exclude certain sources (or particular content from a source) from filtering.
Bonus tip: InPrivate Filtering can be hacked to block most ads, not just ones you’ve seen a certain number of times. As described on Neowin.net, you can download an XML file that lists the Web advertisers blocked by the Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox, then feed that file to InPrivate Filtering to block all those advertisers from IE8.
Once you have the XML file, open the InPrivate Filtering settings and click the “Advanced settings” link at the bottom. In the Manage Add-ons dialog box that pops up, click the Import button, browse to select your new XML file, and click OK. From now on, InPrivate Filtering will block any content from advertisers on the list.
View Incompatible Pages with the Compatibility Viewer
Although Microsoft touts IE8 as its most standards-compliant browser ever, the Web is littered with millions of sites that were written with IE’s earlier, sloppier handling of Web standards in mind. If you come across a page that seems a little wonky, try the Compatibility Viewer, Microsoft’s concession to its own less-than-wholesome past. [PC World]
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